Figuring out life in New York. Writing along the way.

Tag: Oakland Athletics

17-7. That’s not a baseball score. That’s a relatively low-scoring football game, maybe, but it’s definitely not a baseball score.

Unless it is yesterday’s Yankees-A’s game.

View from our seats in the left field bleachers. An optimal Curtis Granderson viewing section.

I was at this game (or at least, I was for 6.5 innings). A friend in my building had two friends from school coming to New York for the weekend, and they needed a fourth person in order to buy seats together on StubHub (no cheap tickets were being sold in threes). So I went. And we had a great time, but we boiled in the heat.

The phrase “dog days of summer” has never been more clear to me than it has over these past two days in New York City. A recent string of 100+ degree days (if two days counts as a string) has plagued everyone’s existence.

En route to the game, water leaked from a vent in the subway car ceiling and the lady standing underneath it said, “Oooh, that felt kind of good.” That’s how you know it’s hot.

The game was slow, but in an odd way, it was the perfect complement to a scorching Friday night. What’s more “dog days of summer” than a slow baseball game in late July where the final score is 17-7? (It was 14-7 when we left during the 7th inning stretch at 10 p.m. By then, games that started an hour later than ours were practically finished. And in case you were wondering, the Yankees won.)

We even witnessed a Mark Teixeira grand slam, and I loved knowing that just a few hundred feet away, John Sterling was yelling “You’re on the Mark, Teixeira!” into his microphone.

It was a scorcher, yes. And it wasn’t a great game. But it was the perfect way to welcome in the dog days.